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Anyone who’s into sports knows how hard it is to get good free stats. The average person can’t collect the stats themselves and spends way too much time visiting various sports sites to get the information they want. Let’s not even talk about paying for that data.

StatSheet.com is a site that provides a slew of college basketball stats for free. We’re not sure where they are getting the data. But, from the looks of the footer, it is at least partially from STATS. Sports stats data is a big industry and regardless whoever is providing the data, you can bet StatSheet.com will not be providing any free stats data APIs. However, it looks they can and do provide charts (chartlets). This is not to be unexpected, it’s expensive and time consuming to collect sports stats. Data providers have to limit what their clients/partners can do and how data is subsequently distributed.

The chartlets and boxscore widgets are more than sufficient for your “average” (read non-developer) sports nut and blogger. There is a wide range of charts to choose from and type of data and comparisons. You can really add value to your blog or personal page/site with the chartlets. But, your options and locations will be limited as it appears that currently all StatSheet.com chartlets and widgets are either JavaScript or iFrame based. This problem will diminish as social networks and sites begin to open up their platforms.

This model has its obvious pros and cons. We are referring to the chartlets and boxscore widgets and not the entire StatSheet.com site as a whole. Since we are a widget focused blog, we are only reviewing that aspect of their service.

The biggest pro is that it’s free. StatSheet.com does a good job of creating chartlets and boxscore widgets. The amount and diversity of stats is just plain awesome. Or as they put it, “The most comprehensive college basketball stats on the web.”

However, there are a couple cons. The chartlets and boxscores, since we can’t create our own directly from data feeds, need to be more customizable. Features like size, colors, etc. would have been good. We also felt that it was difficult to get a specific chart. You have to navigate to a page on the site with the chart you want to grab the code. At least that’s the only way we knew how, after a short stint on the site. A basic chartlet building tool/page where you can select the chart type, teams, stats, size and colors would have been great. Cut out the whole process of searching through the site for what you are trying to get.

Overall, StatSheet.com is a great site for college basketball fanatics. There are all the stats you could ever want, all in one place. The chartlets and widgets are in their early stages and could use some work but it is a good start and there’s definitely a market for it.

It’s been a great tournament so far and it’s come down to the Final Four. It’s a couple of #2 seeds vs. #1 seeds (#2 UCLA vs. #1 Florida and #2 Georgetown vs. #1 Ohio State). These are must see games…

The question this week is, “will UCLA have a repeat of last year’s finals or will they show up and put Florida to task?” Let’s hope UCLA remembers all too well what happened last year and brings it all to the court on March 31st.

Georgetown is back in the Final Four for the first time since 1985 and they look like they’re playing at their peak. Ohio State is going to have their hands full and better watch out. The Hoyas have a long history and tradition. Especially with the win over North Carolina, they’re not just going to let this go without a fight.

Hint: If you want the above widget with the default view on the Final Four. Grab the code as usual, but edit the code param_pDefaultRegionIndex=0 to param_pDefaultRegionIndex=4 (2 locations in the object/embed code, you can ignore the third location in the link code).

Another sports widget just discovered. This one is a run-of-the-mill scoreboard widget for the NBA. It’s got the usual “Yesterday” and “Today” tabs with games and scores. There’s no lack of links taking you back to the NBA.com site.

The “Grab It” button presents the embed code for you to spread the widget around.

This is the fourth sports widget that we know of from Clearspring. If they keep this up, they are going to corner the market on sports related widgets.